Is Steve Jobs losing his mojo? Almost speechless by the end of his Macworld keynote, the Apple chief executive's "to-do-list" left little by way of the surprises or thrills legions of Jobs-loving fanboys have come to expect.
Especially as the two most eagerly awaited announcements there were pretty much public knowledge before …

COMMENTS

Fun

Seems like it'd be a lot easier to make a laptop that thin if you give it such a large screen. All of the other laptops that small are compressed into smaller footprints, thus thicker for the same componentry. No ethernet port? I guess people don't want to copy over their music collections (or parts of it) or movies or anything like that. And does it only have one USB port, or did they just specify that it had USB, not the quantity thereof? Interesting, though, that they gave this thing so much more processing power than most of the extremely small laptops... I imagine that OS X would drag pretty badly on a 1.2 ghz ULV Core 2 Duo. And no mention at all about the weight. If it isn't under 3 pounds then I really don't see the point, since you can get notebooks with optical drives and a full set of ports lighter than that.

And who would be at all interested in a gigabit wan port on a gateway? All of those people out there with 100+mbit internet connections? And they're expected to use a cheap consumer gateway?

and can be ordered online at Apple's web site.

How many more times must I post that pre is totally irrelevant in front of order. Look at what the verb to Order means. look at what the prefix Pre means.

How can you possibly modify a verb that already means to do something in advance or cause something to be done and then add a prefix that makes the verb be in advance of itself.

Pre as a prefix (note) has many places where it is perfectly valid. In front of order is not one of them.

I can't believe an "Editor-in-Chief" would actually be so slack to use it. (Mind you, it looks as though English is not his first language, and French is an arse-about-face language at the best of times.)

Time Capsule

I last week bought the excellent Airport Extreme Giga Base Station (802.11n draft) for 230 swiss francs (£108) and added a generic 500GB USB2 Airdisk for 79 euros (£59) total £167, and Apple.com/uk wish me to buy the Time Capsule for £199?

that's not such a wildly different price from what I assembled, but to pay an extra £130 for another half-terabyte!!!, I could get my system up to 1TB for about £226 allowing me a whole hundred quid towards the flight to Boston to pick-up the new thin shiny toy.

Interesting Specs

From having looked at it, it's a very powerful ultra portable, or a not that great spec laptop.... being able to wirelessly share the optical drive from another PC or Mac is a genius idea, how well it works remains to be seen but still.

I think it's a great bit of kit, it will perform well in terms of processing power, the spinning hard drive is a little slow and the SSD ludicrously expensive, wireless network is at least fast, the add on DVD-RW drive and Ethernet port aren't too pricey and despite being only 100Mb (1Gb NIC wouldn't work over USB2) it's an inexpensive addition at £19

Apart from the weight/size thing it's a very similar spec to my Week 5 MBP, which performs brilliantly on any task i throw at it... many people will slate it i'm sure, but from my use of several mode complete spec (Toshiba R500) Windows Ultraportables, in reality their performance is poor, sure they have big hard drives, built in optical drives (how often do you genuinely use them these days?), built in ethernet etc but the ULV processor crumbles if you open more than 2 apps at once, given the spec of the Air, i think it'll manage just fine with a lot of apps open.

@Scott

"being able to wirelessly share the optical drive from another PC or Mac is a genius idea"

Erm.. please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been able to share my CD/DVD drive between machines in Windows for years. In fact, that's how we usually install stuff onto remote machines - put DVD in local machine, share drive to remote machine and install.

Okay, it's very painful at even 100Mbps with large installs - but saves walking to the server room! ;)

Re: No DVD Drive?

Well yes, but as of the release of Leopard, a DVD drive is an OS requirement for Apple machines. What happens when 10.6 hits? Oh, that's right, you get to use Remote Disc and piggy-back on someone else's optical drive (assuming you've got another Mac in the house), or you get to fork out $99 for the external drive...

@Give it a rest

Apple is NOT a technology company. They are a DESIGN company. Apple have not invented a single new product in yers, they just take what other people have done and dress it up so it looks shiny.

Not a Religion?

Tell that to the Church of Jobs crowd who hang on his every word and think Apple cannot do any wrong, never have problems, never release a shoddy product and flame anyone who tries to point out otherwise.

@JP and alphaxion

JP: 4 million iPhones sounds big enough to me in 6 months sales or were you not listening?

@alphaxion: I suggest you go complain to the EU and get them to drop VAT as that's the biggest cause of your skewed price perception. Otherwise it's the typical $1.8 / £1 ratio we've seen for years.

However... where's the UK apple TV price drop? Sure it dropped to $229 in the US but Apple store is still showing £199 in the UK and we haven't even got the movie rentals yet - there's something to whinge about!

the real news

...is what didn't happen. Where is the fabled iPhone/iPod Touch SDK? Perhaps that was the one more thing that never was...

As for the laptops "missing bits" - I wouldn't miss ethernet, optical drive, multiple usb/firewire ports et al on a secondary system that is meant as an out-of-office tool. They call it the AirBook for a reason. I think Apple is ahead of the curve here. But I'm fucked if I'm going to shell out for a computer that is a sealed unit. Battery, HD and Memory all off limits? Give me a break!